Using a Light Touch to Attack a Dark Subject

Bolstered by a $50 million grant from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City, the Sierra Club is introducing its first major national video campaign to promote its Beyond Coal initiative.

The campaign features five videos that spoof popular television programs from the 1970s and 1980s, and carry 21st-century messages about the dangers of coal. The first two are to be released Monday, while the remaining three will be released in the next two weeks; all will be available on the campaign’s new Facebook page and on Sierra Club’s YouTube Channel. The Sierra Club, the San Francisco-based environmental group that was founded in 1892 by the naturalist John Muir, began its Beyond Coal campaign in 2002. According to the organization, from the mine to the plant, coal “is our dirtiest energy source. Coal is the source of more than 30 percent of our global warming pollution, it causes asthma and other health problems, and mining it destroys our mountains and releases toxic mercury into our communities.”

To combat these ill effects, the Beyond Coal campaign aims to stop construction of new coal plants and retire old plants, and to work with communities to keep coal reserves in the ground.

The Sierra Club said that since Beyond Coal began, proposals for 166 new coal-fired power plants had been abandoned, retirement dates had been secured for 106 existing plants, new mountaintop removal mining permits had slowed significantly and the Tennessee Valley Authority had agreed to phase out coal plants. The Sierra Club called that “the biggest clean air agreement in the history of the Southeast.”

These achievements notwithstanding, the Sierra Club continues to look for ways, like the new videos, “to highlight the absurdity of continuing to burn coal in the 21st century, when there are such better solutions available and affordable, like solar and wind,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club.

“Young people are going to be affected by the worst effects of climate change,” he said. “Young people also will have the chance to work in the solar and wind industries. We wanted to show them that climate change isn’t just an obligation, that there’s opportunity in fighting for a clean energy future.”

He also said it was “very important for us to have fun with the ads. The topics we deal with can be pretty grim and dark. We wanted to find a way to bring a little life into something that can be pretty depressing. It’s an occupational risk for most environmentalists to wag their finger too much, preach too much. We wanted the ads to be an antidote to that, to be serious fun.”

Tommy Means, executive creative director of Mekanism, the San Francisco-based agency that created the videos, said he drew inspiration for them from the American Legacy Foundation’s “Truth” campaign, which was introduced in 2000 and aimed to prevent youth smoking by depicting the tactics of the tobacco industry and consequences of smoking.

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An advertising campaign spoofs "Joy of Painting" to warn about the dangers of coal.Credit
National Sierra Club

Another source of inspiration, Mr. Means said, was “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?”, an early Woody Allen film, released in 1966, in which Mr. Allen overdubbed an English soundtrack on a Japanese action movie to create a comedy about the search for an egg salad recipe.

Thus, all five Sierra Club videos feature a fictitious coal executive, portrayed by John Ennis, a star of “Mr. Show with Bob and David,” a 1990s comedy series, making fake commercials about the coal industry. In each video, he sits in an office and overdubs dialogue for all the male and female characters unrelated to the action depicted, something the viewer discovers only at the end of the video.

“We wanted to show a guy literally manipulating the media, talking into a microphone, overdubbing old TV shows, creating commercials that mislead the public that coal is clean,” Mr. Means said.

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Four of the five videos, which range from 30 to 60 seconds, use film from three old television shows — “Emergency!,” “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” and “The Joy of Painting” — while a fifth uses stock film.

Thus, in the video that uses film from “The Joy of Painting,” the instructor, Bob Ross, paints a landscape with a mountaintop using a scraper and palette. Speaking with a Boston accent provided by Mr. Ennis’s character, he says, “Everyone knows things are better when they’re topless, especially when they’re covered in paint, which I put on the end of this thing. Now you can see where we’ve blown the mountaintop exposing the coal. Scrape-y, scrape-y, goodbye lake-y, and all the rivers and creatures as well. Goodbye boring nature! Coal-da-lay-hee-hoo!”

At the end of the video, a message flashed on the screen says, “Over 500 Appalachian mountains have been destroyed by coal mining,” while the voice-over says, “Coal companies will say anything to make you think coal is safe. Let’s move beyond coal.”

Other videos discuss coal pollution, which the Sierra Club says causes more than 200,000 asthma attacks and leads to over 12,000 emergency room visits each year, and mercury pollution in the United States, whose No. 1 source is coal, according to the Sierra Club. Like “The Joy of Painting” video, these also end with the statement, “Let’s move beyond coal,” and show the URL for the new campaign’s Facebook page, AskMrCoal.com.

Mr. Means said film from the old TV shows was used to “tap into nostalgia and appeal to a pretty broad audience that grew up on them, or whose footage is pretty funny to them.”

The new campaign’s Facebook page will contain videos and other information from Mr. Ennis’s character, while fans will also be able to follow him on Twitter at @mrcoalguy.

Its budget is $300,000.

Discussing Bloomberg Philanthropies’ $50 million grant last July to the Sierra Club for Beyond Coal, a spokeswoman for the National Mining Association told The New York Times that the mayor’s money would be better spent helping to find ways to burn coal more cleanly, because coal will continue to be a major source of electricity in the United States and elsewhere for decades.